


Not Too Late

by Aurumite



Series: Tumblr Prompts [24]
Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: If | Fire Emblem: Fates
Genre: F/F, Post-Conquest Route
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-30
Updated: 2016-08-30
Packaged: 2018-08-11 22:49:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 921
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7910620
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aurumite/pseuds/Aurumite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She hadn’t watched so closely, before the Nohrians hauled Hana away. Now she’s back and Sakura will not miss one detail.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Not Too Late

**Author's Note:**

> For the first day of FeFemslash week: "armour."

Another.

Sakura lines the arrow neatly and pulls the string to her ear. A hiss as she releases. A thump as it lands across the field, right in the center of the target, fletching touching the one she’d just shot.

Again.

Ignoring the ache in her shoulders, she breathes from her core and looses. Direct hit.

More.

“You’ve met today’s score already!”

Hana smiles as she calls the news from outside the field but Sakura can hardly hear her. She doesn’t look. She doesn’t need to. She’s memorized every inch of Hana from afar by now: exactly where her hair waves, the pale scar on her jaw, the way she’ll be leaning on the fence in her hakama, sword at her thin hips, calloused hands crossed at the wrists.  

She hadn’t watched so closely, once. That was before the Nohrians hauled Hana away. Now she’s back, and Sakura will not miss one detail.

Another arrow lodges itself in the target. If she could have shot like this then, would she have had the courage to put it through King Xander’s haughty eye? If he’d gone down, would Ryoma have seen a reason to carry on?

But no, they’d already lost Takumi, and perhaps Hinoka too. The next arrow was for him: the prince who died for his kingdom, the body ravaged by magic Hoshidans had never touched.

Another.

The wiry young man who snuck out of banquets with her, led her off on the veranda and teased her while he helped her breathe out the perfumed air of the pressing crowds that  clogged her lungs.

Another.

The little boy who sat on her floor and played with her dolls, acting out all sorts of dramatic plays, showing her how to tie up their real human hair.

Anoth–

The string snaps out of her grip and slices her finger as it goes. Sakura sucks in air through her teeth. The cut is shallow, but Hana is over the fence and in her shadow before she can wipe the blood off on her shirt. Her hands are cool compared to Sakura’s, whose middle three fingers are red and raw from pulling back.

“It’s all right,” Hana says softly, and to avoid crying, Sakura bites her cheek until she tastes blood there, too. Hana had said the same the night the war ended, when Sakura had just managed to think of Ryoma’s face without tearing up, once she’d got it through her thick skull that Takumi wasn’t coming back, either. She’d said it over and over while Sakura spent the night sobbing into her shoulder, because Hinoka slept before her coronation and her brothers were under the soil and Subaki was still too broken to leave his bed: _It’s all right, it’s all right, it’s all right._

_No it isn’t,_ Sakura wanted to say. She knew because it was her fault. She was the coward who crept out while Ryoma entertained parties alone. She was the child who dumped her fears and troubles in Takumi’s pelt over tea, for him to carry with his own burdens until he became a marionette for his loneliness and rage. She hadn’t aimed for the youngest Nohrian prince, who had eyed him in a way that turned her stomach. She hadn’t pleaded for Azura to love her again, to tell her this was just another of her horror stories. She hadn’t looked Corrin in the eye and asked him, _Can you justify this?_

It is too late for any of it now. Hana’s thumb timidly brushes over her palm, and a lump rises in her throat when Sakura realizes that most of all, it is too late for the way her retainers had run for her on shaking legs when they’d been released. She’d been unable to help them. Subaki coughed blood when he knelt but kept kissing her hem anyway, leaving red prints like lip paint, and she could see one of Hana’s eyes was swelled completely shut before her retainer threw her arms around her neck.

_You’re safe,_ Hana cried in joy as if no one had bound her, no one had hit her face. _Sakura._

“Sakura?”

She looks up into her old friend’s brown eyes and forces a smile.

Things will have to change. She can’t hide ever again. She has so little left, and no harm will come to it– she swears that much. 

“I’m fine,” she says. “It’s just a scratch. I’ll bandage it up and then I’d like to continue.”   

Hana releases her hand and lowers her eyes, but she blushes. Sakura looks on with a bit of fascination. Hana always turns much redder than she does: no cherry blossom but a full-blooming rose, the wide stripe of a sunset.

“I hope you don’t mind that I watch you,” says Hana, and Sakura wonders if perhaps she feels the same way. If her time in a cell hadn’t forced her to lean forward on the wooden fence now and soak in everything left. Sakura finds the will to broaden her smile to something more genuine, and reaches for Hana’s hand so shyly that only their littlest fingers brush.

“Not at all,” she says before she goes to the wooden deck for the bandages. Hana perches on the fence’s top rail instead of leaning, this time: a front-row seat for the invisible battles, the endless trial. It is difficult, Sakura thinks as she settles again into her stance, to become reassuring to just one person. But maybe it’s not too late for that.

**Author's Note:**

> I've seen angry post-war Sakura here and there but I say it's never enough. She's doing the protecting now. Somebody get this girl some ray bans.


End file.
